“The thing that struck me about Africa is how alive everything is there,” said Randy Wykoff, dean of the College of Public and Allied Health. “Things grow. My mom tells a story about how she planted a stake in the ground to grow tomato vines on it, and the stake itself sprouted. Uganda is a country of life and dust and smoke.”
Wykoff lived in Uganda 40 years ago when he was a teenager.
Winston Churchill called Uganda ‘The Pearl of Africa,’ a name that has endured despite the many conflicts taking place in and around Uganda since Churchill’s time.
Uganda’s civil war has gone on for almost 20 years. The conflict may finally be coming to a close.
Joseph Kony is the head of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a cult-like militia that is famous for rape, mass killings, and the abduction of children. In 2002 the LRA was listed by the U.S. Department of State as a terrorist organization.
Pius Matheka, a math major here at ETSU from Kenya, reflected on the conflict.
“If you can’t run for your life they [LRA] kill you,” Matheka said. “If they don’t kill you and you’re strong, they force you to join the soldiers. If you are a woman, you are forced into ‘marriage’ with a soldier. You become a sex slave.”
The main conflict takes place in Acholiland, a region in northern Uganda that borders Sudan. Peace talks are currently being negotiated in Juba, Sudan.
According to Reuters’s AlterNet, Kony and his commanders are wanted for war crimes such as mutilation, rape, killing civilians, and abducting children and forcing them to kill.
In 2005, the Ugandan Health Ministry estimated that more than 20,000 children have been kidnapped by the LRA. Other agencies have estimates as high as 25,000 children, but the exact number is unknown.
In 2004, United Nations Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland estimated that children make up as much as 80 percent of the LRA’s forces.
Peacejournalism.com reports, “[When Kony was] asked whether he would be releasing any children, he retorted: ‘We don’t have any children in our movement. There’s only combatants.'”
Last year more than 1.7 million people were living in refugee camps in northern Uganda. Violence and disease killed 1,000 people a week.
The Ugandan government announced on Nov. 28 that all refugee camps in the north would be emptied by Dec. 31, in order to make people return to their homes.
“The sooner we dismantle the camps, the better because it will be done to improve the problems the displaced persons are facing,” Minister for Relief, Disaster Preparedness and Refugees Tarsis Kabwegyere told the Ugandan daily The Monitor. Kony supported the government’s decision.
“We are for peace and it’s high time people returned and began rebuilding their homes in villages,” Kony told The Monitor.
Peace talks between the Ugandan government and the LRA are being brokered by South Sudan, which has been a haven for the rebels. A large source of controversy related to the peace talks are the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants for Kony and three of his officers: Vincent Otti, Okot Odhiambo and Dominic Ongwen. The warrants were first issued on July 9, 2005.
Some argue that the warrants were useful in forcing Kony to step forward and negotiate, while others say that the warrants could disrupt the truce altogether.
In “The situation in Uganda and the warrants of the LRA Leaders,” the ICC states, “The Ugandan government has acknowledged, as have others, the positive effect that the warrants have had in motivating the LRA to attend peace talks.”
The Monitor reports otherwise. It states that peace talks are “threatened by the arrest warrants issued against the rebel group top leaders by the International Criminal Court” and that the “rebels want the warrants lifted.”
On Oct. 6, the United Nations also launched a $4.8 million proposal for the Juba Initiative Fund, to help the peace talks continue and eventually come to a conclusion, as stated in an Oct. 5 U.N. press release.
Other problems with the peace talks have risen. The LRA has voiced distrust of Riek Machar, vice president of the government of Southern Sudan and facilitator of the peace talks.
The LRA is currently waiting for a positive reply from the South African government to enter the talks as mediators. “The ongoing peace process is the best and most serious opportunity we have had to end the conflict in northern Uganda,” Egeland stated in another Oct. 5 U.N. press release. “It brings great hope for safe return and for the rebuilding of Acholi and Ugandan society.”
The truce, signed in August, was renewed early November.
If peace is reached, 1.7 million Ugandans in refugee camps, and the over 20,000 abducted women and children, will be able to resume their lives. Egeland stated that 10,000 have already returned home, and that “more are thinking about it.”
“They (the Ugandans) have big hurdles to overcome, even to locate former homes, their farms, the landmarks, the trees. All have been destroyed. It’s going to take a long time to go home,” stated Martin Mogwanja, humanitarian coordinator for the United Nations.
“You have so many people in Northern Uganda who believe it’s a matter of time before they will go home,” chief negotiator Betty Bigombe told Reuters’s AlterNet.
“We cannot afford to let them down.

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